Picture this: you’re at a boisterous party, trying to listen in on a group conversation. People are talking over each other and going a mile a minute, but you can only pick up snippets from one person at a time.

Confusing? Sure! Frustrating? Absolutely!

Yet this is how neuroscientists eavesdrop on all the electrical chatter going on in our heads. So much depends on understanding these neuronal conversations: deciphering their secret language is key to understanding—and manipulating—the memories, habits, and other cognitive processes that define us.

To monitor the signals zipping through a network of neurons, scientists often stick a tiny electrode into each single contributor and track its activity. It’s not easy to tease out an entire conversation that way—the process is tedious and prone to serious misunderstandings.

“If you put an electrode in the brain, it’s like trying to understand a phone conversation by hearing only one person talk,” said Dr. Ed Boyden at MIT. A pioneer of optogenetics and the inflatable brain, the neuroscience wunderkind has spent the past decade developing creative neurotechnological toolkits that have sparked excitement and garnered praise.

Now Boyden may have a way to tap into an entire neuronal group chat.

With the help of a robot, the team designed a protein that tunnels into the outer shell, or membrane, of a neuron. If there’s a slight change in the voltage, as when the neuron fires, the protein immediately transforms into a fluorescent torch that’s easy to spot under a microscope.

With a whole network of neurons, the embedded sensors spark like fireworks.

A light-sensitive protein embedded in neuron membranes emits a fluorescent signal related to the amount of voltage in the cell. The method could allow the study of neurons in real time. Image Credit: Kiryl Piatkevich and Erica Jung/MIT

“Now we can record the neural activity of many cells in a neural circuit and hear them as they talk to each other,” said Boyden.

But the new sensor isn’t even the big advance. The robotic system, pieced together from easily available components, allows other neuroscientists to develop their own sensors.

By releasing the blueprint in Nature Chemical Biology, Boyden and his team hope the community will rapidly evolve stronger and more sensitive activity probes for the brain, thereby lighting the way to finally figuring out what exactly is a thought, a decision, or a feeling.

The Neural Lighthouse

To be fair, Boyden is far from the first to come up with these so-called “voltage sensors.”

But finding the perfect one has eluded neuroscientists for two decades. To precisely report neuronal firing, these proteins need to be able to rapidly turn on their light beams after the neuron fires—with a reaction time in the range of a tenth of a second, if not faster.

What’s more, they also need to be able to find the best seat in the house: smack on the neuronal membrane, where the voltage change happens, as opposed to inside a cell.

Finally, they need to shine long and bright. Lots of sensors lose their glow rapidly after exposure to light—dubbed “photobleaching,” the bane of neural cartographers. To match neuronal activity to behaviors, the indicators need to stay bright for at least several seconds.

Developing these sensors has traditionally been an extremely tedious affair. Scientists often start with a known sensor, swap some of its constituent molecules with others like Lego pieces, test the resulting new sensor in cells, and hope for the best. The process can take weeks, if not months.

In a process that resembles accelerated evolution, the team started with a known light-sensitive sensor and randomly triggered mutations into the protein, making 1.5 million (!!) versions in total.

They then inserted all of the variants into mammalian cells—one variant per cell—and waited for the sensors to reach the cell’s membrane. Next, they programmed a microscope to automatically take photos of the cells.

It’s a powerful algorithm. “This version was modified from previous versions to be compatible with any microscope…camera and/or other optional hardware,” the authors said.

Once the microscope identified each individual cell, a robotic glass tube sucked up the cell into its private glass tube and examined whether the sensor variant satisfied all the requirements. Here, the team specifically focused on two criteria: the protein’s location and its brightness.

In this way, the team rapidly identified the top five candidates, and then subjected them to another round of mutations generating eight million (!!!) new variants. With help from their trusty robot cell picker, they narrowed the best performers down to seven proteins, which they then characterized using good old electrical recordings to see how fast the sensors responded to voltage fluctuations.

In the end, only two sensors met all criteria, and the authors named them Archon1 and Archon2 respectively.

Normally it’s excruciatingly hard to find sensors that excel in multiple domains, the authors say. The robotic screen works so well because it acts like a multi-round game show. To remain a candidate, each variant has to stand out in each round of testing, whether for its brightness, location, or speed.

“(It’s) a very clever high-throughput screening approach,” said Harvard professor Dr. Adam Cohen, who was not involved in this study. Cohen previously developed a sensor called QuasAr2 (get it?) that Boyden used here as a starting point to generate his mutant forms.

Brain Fireworks

Putting Archon1 to the test, the team inserted the protein onto the neuronal membranes of cortical neurons in mice. These cells come from the outermost region of the brain—the cortex—often considered the seat of higher cognitive functions.

Archon1 performed fabulously in brain slices from these mice. When stimulated with a reddish-orange light, the protein emitted a longer wavelength of red light that matched up to the neuron’s voltage swings—the brightness of the protein corresponds to a particular voltage.

The sensor was extremely quick on its feet, capable of reporting each time a neuron fired in near real time.

The team also tested Archon1 in two of neuroscience’s darling translucent animal models: a zebrafish and a tiny worm called C. elegans. Don’t underestimate these critters: zebrafish are often used to study how the brain encodes vision, hearing movement or fear, whereas C. elegans has shed lighton the circuits that drive eating, socializing, and even sex.

Because of their see-through bodies, it’s particularly useful to watch their neurons light up in action because of the higher signal-to-noise ratio. As in the mouse brain, Archon1 performed beautifully, rapidly emitting light that lasted at least eight minutes.

Even cooler, Archon1 can be used in conjunction with optogenetic tools. In a proof-of-concept, the team used blue light to activate a neuron in C. elegans and watched Archon1 light up in response—an amazing visual feedback, especially since neuroscientists often use electrical recordings to see whether their optogenetic tricks worked.

Brighter Future

The team is now looking to test their sensor in living mice while performing certain behaviors and tasks.

The sensor “opens up the exciting possibility of simultaneous recordings of large populations of neurons” and of capturing each individual firing from every single neuron, the authors said. We’ll be watching neural computations happen in real time under the microscope.

And the best is yet to come. Scientific-grade cameras are increasingly capable of taking images at faster speeds and allowing for higher resolutions with a broader field of view. Mapping the brain with Archon1 and future generation sensors will no doubt yield buckets of new findings and theories about how the brain works.

“Over the next five years or so we’re going to try to solve some small brain circuits completely,” said Boyden.

It is one of the top 10 deadliest diseases in the United States, and it cannot be cured or prevented. But new studies are finding ways to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease in its earliest stages, while some of the latest research says technologies like artificial intelligence can detect dementia years before the first symptoms occur.

These advances, in turn, will help bolster clinical trials seeking a cure or therapies to slow or prevent the disease. Catching Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia early in their progression can help ease symptoms in some cases.

“Often neurodegeneration is diagnosed late when massive brain damage has already occurred,” says professor Francis L Martin at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK, in an email to Singularity Hub. “As we know more about the molecular basis of the disease, there is the possibility of clinical interventions that might slow or halt the progress of the disease, i.e., before brain damage. Extending cognitive ability for even a number of years would have huge benefit.”

Blood Diamond

The researchers used sensor-based technology with a diamond core to analyze about 550 blood samples. They identified specific chemical bonds within the blood after passing light through the diamond core and recording its interaction with the sample. The results were then compared against blood samples from cases of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases, along with those from healthy individuals.

“From a small drop of blood, we derive a fingerprint spectrum. That fingerprint spectrum contains numerical data, which can be inputted into a computational algorithm we have developed,” Martin explains. “This algorithm is validated for prediction of unknown samples. From this we determine sensitivity and specificity. Although not perfect, my clinical colleagues reliably tell me our results are far better than anything else they have seen.”

Martin says the breakthrough is the result of more than 10 years developing sensor-based technologies for routine screening, monitoring, or diagnosing neurodegenerative diseases and cancers.

“My vision was to develop something low-cost that could be readily applied in a typical clinical setting to handle thousands of samples potentially per day or per week,” he says, adding that the technology also has applications in environmental science and food security.

The new test can also distinguish accurately between Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of neurodegeneration, such as Lewy body dementia, which is one of the most common causes of dementia after Alzheimer’s.

“To this point, other than at post-mortem, there has been no single approach towards classifying these pathologies,” Martin notes. “MRI scanning is often used but is labor-intensive, costly, difficult to apply to dementia patients, and not a routine point-of-care test.”

Crystal Ball

Canadian researchers at McGill University believe they can predict Alzheimer’s disease up to two years before its onset using big data and artificial intelligence. They developed an algorithm capable of recognizing the signatures of dementia using a single amyloid PET scan of the brain of patients at risk of developing the disease.

Alzheimer’s is caused by the accumulation of two proteins—amyloid beta and tau. The latest research suggests that amyloid beta leads to the buildup of tau, which is responsible for damaging nerve cells and connections between cells called synapses.

“Despite the availability of biomarkers capable of identifying the proteins causative of Alzheimer’s disease in living individuals, the current technologies cannot predict whether carriers of AD pathology in the brain will progress to dementia,” Sulantha Mathotaarachchi, lead author on the paper and an expert in artificial neural networks, tells Singularity Hub by email.

The algorithm, trained on a population with amnestic mild cognitive impairment observed over 24 months, proved accurate 84.5 percent of the time. Mathotaarachchi says the algorithm can be trained on different populations for different observational periods, meaning the system can grow more comprehensive with more data.

“The more biomarkers we incorporate, the more accurate the prediction could be,” Mathotaarachchi adds. “However, right now, acquiring [the] required amount of training data is the biggest challenge. … In Alzheimer’s disease, it is known that the amyloid protein deposition occurs decades before symptoms onset.”

Unfortunately, the same process occurs in normal aging as well. “The challenge is to identify the abnormal patterns of deposition that lead to the disease later on,” he says

One of the key goals of the project is to improve the research in Alzheimer’s disease by ensuring those patients with the highest probability to develop dementia are enrolled in clinical trials. That will increase the efficiency of clinical programs, according to Mathotaarachchi.

“One of the most important outcomes from our study was the pilot, online, real-time prediction tool,” he says. “This can be used as a framework for patient screening before recruiting for clinical trials. … If a disease-modifying therapy becomes available for patients, a predictive tool might have clinical applications as well, by providing to the physician information regarding clinical progression.”

Pixel by Pixel Prediction

Private industry is also working toward improving science’s predictive powers when it comes to detecting dementia early. One startup called Darmiyan out of San Francisco claims its proprietary software can pick up signals before the onset of Alzheimer’s disease by up to 15 years.

Darmiyan didn’t respond to a request for comment for this article. Venture Beat reported that the company’s MRI-analyzing software “detects cell abnormalities at a microscopic level to reveal what a standard MRI scan cannot” and that the “software measures and highlights subtle microscopic changes in the brain tissue represented in every pixel of the MRI image long before any symptoms arise.”

Darmiyan claims to have a 90 percent accuracy rate and says its software has been vetted by top academic institutions like New York University, Rockefeller University, and Stanford, according to Venture Beat. The startup is awaiting FDA approval to proceed further but is reportedly working with pharmaceutical companies like Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer on pilot programs.

Conclusions

An estimated 5.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s, and one in 10 people over age 65 have been diagnosed with the disease. By mid-century, the number of Alzheimer’s patients could rise to 16 million. Health care costs in 2017 alone are estimated to be $259 billion, and by 2050 the annual price tag could be more than $1 trillion.

In sum, it’s a disease that cripples people and the economy.

Researchers are always after more data as they look to improve outcomes, with the hope of one day developing a cure or preventing the onset of neurodegeneration altogether. If interested in seeing this medical research progress, you can help by signing up on the Brain Health Registry to improve the quality of clinical trials.

In November 2017, a gunman entered a church in Sutherland Springs in Texas, where he killed 26 people and wounded 20 others. He escaped in his car, with police and residents in hot pursuit, before losing control of the vehicle and flipping it into a ditch. When the police got to the car, he was dead. The episode is horrifying enough without its unsettling epilogue. In the course of their investigations, the FBI reportedly pressed the gunman’s finger to the fingerprint-recognition feature on his iPhone in an attempt to unlock it. Regardless of who’s affected, it’s disquieting to think of the police using a corpse to break into someone’s digital afterlife.

Most democratic constitutions shield us from unwanted intrusions into our brains and bodies. They also enshrine our entitlement to freedom of thought and mental privacy. That’s why neurochemical drugs that interfere with cognitive functioning can’t be administered against a person’s will unless there’s a clear medical justification. Similarly, according to scholarlyopinion, law-enforcement officials can’t compel someone to take a lie-detector test, because that would be an invasion of privacy and a violation of the right to remain silent.

But in the present era of ubiquitous technology, philosophers are beginning to ask whether biological anatomy really captures the entirety of who we are. Given the role they play in our lives, do our devices deserve the same protections as our brains and bodies?

After all, your smartphone is much more than just a phone. It can tell a more intimate story about you than your best friend. No other piece of hardware in history, not even your brain, contains the quality or quantity of information held on your phone: it ‘knows’ whom you speak to, when you speak to them, what you said, where you have been, your purchases, photos, biometric data, even your notes to yourself—and all this dating back years.

In 2014, the United States Supreme Court used this observation to justify the decision that police must obtain a warrant before rummaging through our smartphones. These devices “are now such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy,” as Chief Justice John Roberts observed in his written opinion.

The Chief Justice probably wasn’t making a metaphysical point—but the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers were when they argued in “The Extended Mind” (1998) that technology is actually part of us. According to traditional cognitive science, “thinking” is a process of symbol manipulation or neural computation, which gets carried out by the brain. Clark and Chalmers broadly accept this computational theory of mind, but claim that tools can become seamlessly integrated into how we think. Objects such as smartphones or notepads are often just as functionally essential to our cognition as the synapses firing in our heads. They augment and extend our minds by increasing our cognitive power and freeing up internal resources.

If accepted, the extended mind thesis threatens widespread cultural assumptions about the inviolate nature of thought, which sits at the heart of most legal and social norms. As the US Supreme Court declared in 1942: “freedom to think is absolute of its own nature; the most tyrannical government is powerless to control the inward workings of the mind.” This view has its origins in thinkers such as John Locke and René Descartes, who argued that the human soul is locked in a physical body, but that our thoughts exist in an immaterial world, inaccessible to other people. One’s inner life thus needs protecting only when it is externalized, such as through speech. Many researchers in cognitive science still cling to this Cartesian conception—only, now, the private realm of thought coincides with activity in the brain.

But today’s legal institutions are straining against this narrow concept of the mind. They are trying to come to grips with how technology is changing what it means to be human, and to devise new normative boundaries to cope with this reality. Justice Roberts might not have known about the idea of the extended mind, but it supports his wry observation that smartphones have become part of our body. If our minds now encompass our phones, we are essentially cyborgs: part-biology, part-technology. Given how our smartphones have taken over what were once functions of our brains—remembering dates, phone numbers, addresses—perhaps the data they contain should be treated on a par with the information we hold in our heads. So if the law aims to protect mental privacy, its boundaries would need to be pushed outwards to give our cyborg anatomy the same protections as our brains.

This line of reasoning leads to some potentially radical conclusions. Some philosophers have argued that when we die, our digital devices should be handled as remains: if your smartphone is a part of who you are, then perhaps it should be treated more like your corpse than your couch. Similarly, one might argue that trashing someone’s smartphone should be seen as a form of “extended” assault, equivalent to a blow to the head, rather than just destruction of property. If your memories are erased because someone attacks you with a club, a court would have no trouble characterizing the episode as a violent incident. So if someone breaks your smartphone and wipes its contents, perhaps the perpetrator should be punished as they would be if they had caused a head trauma.

The extended mind thesis also challenges the law’s role in protecting both the content and the means of thought—that is, shielding what and how we think from undue influence. Regulation bars non-consensual interference in our neurochemistry (for example, through drugs), because that meddles with the contents of our mind. But if cognition encompasses devices, then arguably they should be subject to the same prohibitions. Perhaps some of the techniques that advertisers use to hijack our attention online, to nudge our decision-making or manipulate search results, should count as intrusions on our cognitive process. Similarly, in areas where the law protects the means of thought, it might need to guarantee access to tools such as smartphones—in the same way that freedom of expression protects people’s right not only to write or speak, but also to use computers and disseminate speech over the internet.

The courts are still some way from arriving at such decisions. Besides the headline-making cases of mass shooters, there are thousands of instances each year in which police authorities try to get access to encrypted devices. Although the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution protects individuals’ right to remain silent (and therefore not give up a passcode), judges in several states have ruled that police can forcibly use fingerprints to unlock a user’s phone. (With the new facial-recognition feature on the iPhone X, police might only need to get an unwitting user to look at her phone.) These decisions reflect the traditional concept that the rights and freedoms of an individual end at the skin.

But the concept of personal rights and freedoms that guides our legal institutions is outdated. It is built on a model of a free individual who enjoys an untouchable inner life. Now, though, our thoughts can be invaded before they have even been developed—and in a way, perhaps this is nothing new. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman used to say that he thought with his notebook. Without a pen and pencil, a great deal of complex reflection and analysis would never have been possible. If the extended mind view is right, then even simple technologies such as these would merit recognition and protection as a part of the essential toolkit of the mind.This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

New planets found in distant corners of the galaxy. Climate models that may improve our understanding of sea level rise. The emergence of new antimalarial drugs. These scientific advances and discoveries have been in the news in recent months.

While representing wildly divergent disciplines, from astronomy to biotechnology, they all have one thing in common: Artificial intelligence played a key role in their scientific discovery.

One of the more recent and famous examples came out of NASA at the end of 2017. The US space agency had announced an eighth planet discovered in the Kepler-90 system. Scientists had trained a neural network—a computer with a “brain” modeled on the human mind—to re-examine data from Kepler, a space-borne telescope with a four-year mission to seek out new life and new civilizations. Or, more precisely, to find habitable planets where life might just exist.

The researchers trained the artificial neural network on a set of 15,000 previously vetted signals until it could identify true planets and false positives 96 percent of the time. It then went to work on weaker signals from nearly 700 star systems with known planets.

The machine detected Kepler 90i—a hot, rocky planet that orbits its sun about every two Earth weeks—through a nearly imperceptible change in brightness captured when a planet passes a star. It also found a sixth Earth-sized planet in the Kepler-80 system.

AI Handles Big Data

The application of AI to science is being driven by three great advances in technology, according to Ross King from the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Manchester, leader of a team that developed an artificially intelligent “scientist” called Eve.

AI systems also beat humans when it comes to dealing with huge, diverse amounts of data.

That’s partly what attracted a team of glaciologists to turn to machine learning to untangle the factors involved in how heat from Earth’s interior might influence the ice sheet that blankets Greenland.

The machine learning model, for example, predicts elevated heat flux upstream of Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest-moving glacier in the world.

“The major advantage is that we can incorporate so many different types of data,” explains Leigh Stearns, associate professor of geology at Kansas University, whose research takes her to the polar regions to understand how and why Earth’s great ice sheets are changing, questions directly related to future sea level rise.

“All of the other models just rely on one parameter to determine heat flux, but the [machine learning] approach incorporates all of them,” Stearns told Singularity Hub in an email. “Interestingly, we found that there is not just one parameter…that determines the heat flux, but a combination of many factors.”

The research was published last month in Geophysical Research Letters.

Stearns says her team hopes to apply high-powered machine learning to characterize glacier behavior over both short and long-term timescales, thanks to the large amounts of data that she and others have collected over the last 20 years.

Emergence of Robot Scientists

While Stearns sees machine learning as another tool to augment her research, King believes artificial intelligence can play a much bigger role in scientific discoveries in the future.

“I am interested in developing AI systems that autonomously do science—robot scientists,” he said. Such systems, King explained, would automatically originate hypotheses to explain observations, devise experiments to test those hypotheses, physically run the experiments using laboratory robotics, and even interpret the results. The conclusions would then influence the next cycle of hypotheses and experiments.

His AI scientist Eve recently helped researchers discover that triclosan, an ingredient commonly found in toothpaste, could be used as an antimalarial drug against certain strains that have developed a resistance to other common drug therapies. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Automation using artificial intelligence for drug discovery has become a growing area of research, as the machines can work orders of magnitude faster than any human. AI is also being applied in related areas, such as synthetic biology for the rapid design and manufacture of microorganisms for industrial uses.

King argues that machines are better suited to unravel the complexities of biological systems, with even the most “simple” organisms are host to thousands of genes, proteins, and small molecules that interact in complicated ways.

“Robot scientists and semi-automated AI tools are essential for the future of biology, as there are simply not enough human biologists to do the necessary work,” he said.

Creating Shockwaves in Science

The use of machine learning, neural networks, and other AI methods can often get better results in a fraction of the time it would normally take to crunch data.

For instance, scientists at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have a deep learning system for the rapid detection and characterization of gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are disturbances in spacetime, emanating from big, high-energy cosmic events, such as the massive explosion of a star known as a supernova. The “Holy Grail” of this type of research is to detect gravitational waves from the Big Bang.

Dubbed Deep Filtering, the method allows real-time processing of data from LIGO, a gravitational wave observatory comprised of two enormous laser interferometers located thousands of miles apart in California and Louisiana. The research was published in Physics Letters B. You can watch a trippy visualization of the results below.

In a more down-to-earth example, scientists published a paper last month in Science Advances on the development of a neural network called ConvNetQuake to detect and locate minor earthquakes from ground motion measurements called seismograms.

ConvNetQuake uncovered 17 times more earthquakes than traditional methods. Scientists say the new method is particularly useful in monitoring small-scale seismic activity, which has become more frequent, possibly due to fracking activities that involve injecting wastewater deep underground. You can learn more about ConvNetQuake in this video:

King says he believes that in the long term there will be no limit to what AI can accomplish in science. He and his team, including Eve, are currently working on developing cancer therapies under a grant from DARPA.

“Robot scientists are getting smarter and smarter; human scientists are not,” he says. “Indeed, there is arguably a case that human scientists are less good. I don’t see any scientist alive today of the stature of a Newton or Einstein—despite the vast number of living scientists. The Physics Nobel [laureate] Frank Wilczek is on record as saying (10 years ago) that in 100 years’ time the best physicist will be a machine. I agree.”

Ungerleider is an expert in the field of end-of-life care and is working to overhaul patient treatment at this life stage. She practices internal medicine at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is also the founder of the End Well project, a new symposium focused on using human-centered design principles to improve the end-of-life experience.

While explaining the current status quo of end-of-life care Ungerleider said, “It’s really important for people to understand that, by default, you will receive aggressive invasive care no matter how old you are, no matter how sick you are, and even if it won’t help you. That’s our default protocol in the United States.”

Having standardized medical protocols for many conditions is crucial, but when it comes to end-of-life care, these impersonal and uniform treatment plans fail to honor the needs of the individual at hand. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because what it means to “end well” is unique for everyone. Because of this, Ungerleider’s core message is that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all treatment plan for the end-of-life experience.

Ungerleider said, “As a physician, it’s really all about making sure that the care people receive is care that they really want, and that they understand. It’s about honoring the way that people have lived their lives and looking at what’s most important to them and what are their goals and values for living.”

By bringing together communities of designers, technologists, healthcare professionals, and activists at the End Well project, Ungerleider hopes to overhaul the current medical approach to end-of-life care—and to ultimately make it a more human experience.

The term “silver bullet” gets tossed around a lot, but cancer vaccines are just that. Unlike the flu vaccines that we’re familiar with, cancer vaccines are slightly different in that they don’t just seek to prevent cancers from forming. In many cases, these vaccines also treat tumors already within the body.

What unites cancer vaccines is this: these agents, ranging from chemicals to DNA-like molecules to cells, all give the immune system a boost so that it better recognizes and attacks cancer cells.

To Dr. Ronald Levy, an oncologist at Stanford University, cancer immunotherapy is the way to go. You may have heard of some of these treatments already. CAR-T, which genetically enhances a patient’s immune cells to better target cancers, was approved last year to treat certain types of blood cancers.

“All of these immunotherapy advances are changing medical practice,” he says.

And a tidal wave is coming. Just this month, two studies explored completely new ways to shock the immune system back into action. The first, a Stanford study published in Cell Stem Cell, surprisingly found that induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from a patient can “train” the immune system into attacking or preventing tumors in mice.

This visual abstract depicts how cancer immunity against multiple types of cancer can be achieved using an easily generable iPSC-based cancer vaccine. This immunity is based on overlapping epitopes between iPSCs and cancer cells and can also be achieved by reactivating the immune system as an adjuvant. Image Credit: Kooreman and Kim et al./Cell Stem Cell

The second, led by Levy and published in Science Advances, found a simple, ready-to-use system to boost immune T cells. By injecting two molecules directly into solid tumors, they reinvigorated confused T cells, transforming them into super soldiers that wiped out both local cancer cells and those that have already spread.

The best thing? These approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. We could envision a treatment regime whereby a patient first receives a personalized iPSC cancer vaccine, followed by a universal “booster shot” that further enhances T cell efficacy.

T Cell Boot Camp

Cancer cells exist in a sort of limbo. When they first begin to mutate, swapping normal surface proteins with cancerous ones, it throws the immune system into red alert. T cells perk up, infiltrate into the tumor mass and begin sweeping the area clean of the dangerous mutants.

Yet at some point, cancer cells fight back. They learn to invade the T cell’s surveillance system, or even figure out ways to keep those immune soldiers from doing their jobs.

The thing is, it takes a while for rookie T cells to realize that something’s awry. Trained soldiers are another story—these guys spring into action, beating back cancers before they have a chance to grow.

What if we could take “naïve” T cells to boot camp?

In one early study, a team identified proteins on melanoma cells (a common, but deadly type of skin cancer) that were specific to the cancer. These cells came from tumors surgically removed from patients who were at high risk of recurrence.

The team synthesized molecules that resembled these melanoma markers and injected them back into the patients to “train” their immune systems. 25 months later, four out of six treated patients remained cancer free—a small win, but a huge proof-of-concept for the field.

But the approach has a drawback: it requires complex computer algorithms to tease out which markers to use as bait, and making them from scratch is expensive.

The Stem Cell Solution

In a surprising twist, Wu and colleagues found another Trojan horse draped in cancer-like markers on its surface—iPSCs.

By comparing the gene expression profiles of cancer and iPSCs, the team found remarkable similarities, suggesting that the two cell types may share surface markers that could act as “red flags” to the immune system. In fact, iPSCs can often form a type of tumor called teratomas when injected into mice, and like cancer cells, they’re free from growth restrictions normally built into healthy, adult cells.

To see if iPSCs can act as a vaccine, the team injected mice with four doses of iPSCs over a month. These cells were converted from the mice’s own skin cells and irradiated to prevent them from forming teratomas. Like most cancer therapies, the team also added a generic immune-stimulating chemical to the cells, which by itself had no observable effect.

The mice were then transplanted with mouse breast cancer cells. One week later, the saline control group developed large, dramatic tumors at the injection site. In contrast, 70 percent of the vaccinated mice slowed tumor growth, while two completely beat back the cancer. They lived cancer-free for over a year.

“Once activated, the immune system is on alert to target cancers as they develop throughout the body,”says study author Nigel Kooreman, adding that the technique is especially powerful because we can simultaneously “train” the immune system on multiple types of cancer markers.

The Universal Booster

The first is a short piece of DNA dubbed a CpG oligonucleotide. It’s like installing a turbo on a diesel engine—the molecule causes T cells to up their expression of a molecule called OX40 (the turbo).

The second shot is like giving fuel to the new engine. The shot contains a molecule that binds OX40, which causes T cells to rev their engines to a full roar.

The vaccine worked shocking well in mice transplanted with lymphoma tumors at two places in their bodies. In 87 out of 90 mice, a three-dose treatment at one site eliminated cancer cells from both locations. Similarly, transplanted mouse breast, colon, and melanoma tumors were also beaten back with the vaccine.

The shot also worked for animals genetically engineered to spontaneously develop breast cancer, wiping out cancer cells both at the site of injection and those that sprung up further away. What’s more, the shot lowered the chance of the animals developing future tumors, and boosted their survival rate. At 15 weeks after the shot, roughly 80 percent of the vaccinated animals survived, whereas all those in the control group perished.

Even more incredibly, the team found that the treatment was extremely specific. T cells reinvigorated to attack lymphoma cells did not harm colon cancer cells or other normal cells. This is likely because the drugs only activate T cells already present inside the injected tumor—in other words, T cells capable of recognizing and infiltrating a specific type of cancer cell.

Unlike previous cancer immunotherapies, Levy’s vaccine is extremely elegant in its simplicity. It doesn’t need to identify cancer markers specific for each patient, or customize each patient’s T cells as in CAR-T.

Even better: both molecules in the vaccine are already approved individually for human use.

Levy is now recruiting about 15 patients with lymphoma to test the therapy. If it works, patients with multiple tumors could receive a shot and let the vaccine do the work. Surgeons in the future could inoculate a patient before removing the tumor tissue to ward off against the cancer springing back to life.

There are limitations. A big one: the vaccine currently only targets solid tumors. For now, it doesn’t work on blood cancers such as leukemia.

Still, cancers beware. All those with sleeper T cells buried within are now potentially in the firing line.

“I don’t think there’s a limit to the type of tumor we could potentially treat,” saysLevy.

Save for the occasional burning pain that accompanies a run, most people don’t pay much attention to the two-leafed organ puffing away in our chests.

But lungs are feats of engineering wonder: with over 40 types of cells embedded in a delicate but supple matrix, they continuously pump oxygen into the bloodstream over an area the size of a tennis field. Their exquisite tree-like structure optimizes gas exchange efficiency; unfortunately, it also makes engineering healthy replacement lungs a near-impossible task.

Rather than building lungs from scratch, scientists take a “replace and refresh approach”: they take a diseased lung, flush out its sickly, inflamed cells and reseed the empty matrix with healthy ones.

It’s an intricate procedure—nevertheless, the delicate branches of blood vessels are often completely destroyed during the process. Without blood to deliver nutrients and molecules to the newly seeded cells, the graft fails.

What if, thought Dr. Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic at Columbia University, rather than removing all cells from a donor lung, we gently clean out only the diseased cells in the airway without touching blood circulation?

This week, Vunjak-Novakovic’s team published a “radically new approach” to bioengineering lungs: making scaffolds with blood vessels intact.

When researchers added back therapeutic human cells that line the lung’s airways to a rat lung scaffold, the foreign cells—in this case, epithelium cells—homed to the correct location, attached, and thrived.

Because lung failure often stems from diseased epithelium cells, says study author Dr. N. Valerio Dorrello, this new method allows us to regenerate lungs by treating just the injured cells.

Dr. Matthew Bacchetta, who also worked on the project, sees the method as a “transformative” way to obtain lungs ready for transplant. Because lungs are notoriously bad at repairing themselves, in severe cases the only real option is a transplant.

It’s a hard sell—only up to 20 percent of patients are still alive ten years later, the procedure is expensive, and the demand for donor lungs far exceeds the supply.

These new “vascularized” lungs bring us one step closer to the penultimate goal: transplanting lungs made from a patient’s own cells, seeded onto a donor scaffold from a cadaver or even primate or pig.

“As a lung transplant surgeon, I am very excited about the great potential of our technique,” he says.

First Breath

Engineering functional lungs is nothing short of a moonshot, even in the ambitious field of regenerative medicine.

The lung is a real jungle: at the microscopic level, the tree-like airways contain alveoli, tiny bubble-like structures where the lungs exchange gas with our blood. Both arteries and veins enwrap the alveoli like two sets of mesh pockets.

At least a half dozen cellular denizens work in tandem to keep the alveoli spheres inflated, to guard the organ against infections, and to enforce the structure of its many branches.

This three-dimensional complexity is why we ruled out the possibility of growing lungs from scratch, explains Dr. Laura Niklason, a biomedical engineer at Yale University who was not involved in the new study.

Back in 2010, Niklason had a brilliant idea: rather than relying on synthetic templates that mimic the organ’s intricate structure—a “very tall order,” she says—scientists could use nature’s own template, the lung’s matrix, as a jumping off point.

Niklason’s approach is similar to stripping down a house to its bare bones—weight-bearing beams, struts and bolts—and reworking the rest to its new owner’s tastes.

As a proof-of-concept, Niklason’s team used a detergent that washed away the cells and blood vessels from a rat lung. They then soaked the lung matrix scaffold inside a “bioreactor” that mimics the conditions of a growing fetus.

When the team reseeded the scaffold with a cocktail of cells, the lung regrew its blood vessels, alveoli and tiny airways with the right types of cells—all within four days.

In the ultimate test of functionality, Niklason’s team transplanted the regrown lungs back into living rats. A few seconds later, the lung inflated, turning bright red as it took in oxygen and blood supply.

It’s just an initial step, the team wrote at the time. The lungs only survived up to two hours in the donor’s body, and subsequent analysis revealed bleeding and blood clots within the airway and regrown capillaries.

One potential reason is this: the blood vessels may not have formed proper junctions with the alveoli. While still allowing gas exchange, this eventually causes blood leaks into the lungs.

Breath of Fresh Air

If newly-grown blood vessels form malfunctioned junctions, why not preserve the originals instead?

That’s exactly what Vunjak-Novakovic’s team tackled in the new studypublished in Science Advances.

Adapting Niklason’s technique, the team inserted a tube into the airway of a newly harvested rat lung and pumped through a gentle detergent that only removed the lung’s epithelial cells—the inner lining.

Blood vessels, in contrast, were washed with an electrolyte solution similar to Gatorade.

With this small change, we removed over 70 percent of epithelial cells—which are often the root of lung diseases—but maintained the vasculature, the authors say.

Like cartographers mapping a new land, the team next probed the integrity of the vessels. Injecting tiny beads that glow under UV light into the lung’s main artery, they watched as the beads flooded the twisting capillaries, glowing bright within the larger vessels.

In contrast, there were no obvious signs of glowing beads within the airway or alveoli, suggesting that the blood vessels were intact—no leakage!

With scaffold in hand, the team next marinated the structure with human lung epithelium cells. As a bonus, they also used lung cells derived from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). iPSCs are made from a patient’s own cells—often skin cells—and can be coaxed to become nearly any other cell type with the right cocktail of signals.

Because iPSCs retain the person’s immune profile, scaffolds seeded with these cells have a much lower chance of being rejected.

Within a mere 24 hours, the team detected signs of the newly seeded cells within the lung scaffolds. Under the microscope, the newcomers attached to the right spot, stabilized and begun rapidly dividing to repopulate the missing cells.

The lung grafts also had a boost in breathing power—they could expand more fully—gaining back roughly 50 percent of what was lost during the detergent treatment.

A Breath Away?

The study stops short at the final test: transplanting the engineered lung back into a recipient. As with older generation scaffolds, the newly minted lungs could also develop deadly blood clots or bleeding once reintroduced into a living, breathing animal.

What’s more, the team only used a mild detergent in their preparation to preserve the lung’s integrity. The result was a partial cleanout with some of the rats’ own epithelial cells still intact.

These injured stragglers may provide important information to the new, healthy cells, so this could be an unexpected bonus, the authors explain. Whether they are friend or foe will have to be tested in a future study.

The technology needs a lot more work before it could be used in humans, but Vunjak-Novakovic and colleagues are already excited about potential new treatment options.

This study provides proof-of-concept evidence that our approach works, the authors write. We show, for the first time, that it’s possible to wash out diseased lung epithelial cells without touching blood vessels.

What really gets the team excited is this: although freshly harvested rat lungs were used in this study, in theory the method could be used without removing the lung.

This is “transformative:” patients with injured lung epithelial cells could be irrigated with the detergent to remove the sickly cells. Doctors can then harvest their skin cells and transform them into healthy lung cells to reseed the lung.

“Every day, I see children in intensive care with severe lung disease who depend on mechanical ventilation support,” says Dorrello. We may be on our way to an entirely new treatment solution for these patients and regenerate their broken lungs, he says.

The advance of CRISPR gene editing technology, which uses an RNA strand to guide an enzyme called Cas9 to cut a specific portion of DNA, has raised concerns and sparked debate as people envision a not-so-distant future populated by bioengineered super-crops, genetically flawless pets, and customized babies. While the method could be used for these purposes, it’s also showing potential as a valuable medical tool, with a seemingly new condition added each week to the list of what CRISPR may one day cure.

One recent addition to that list is Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In a study from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, researchers used CRISPR to make a single cut at a few strategic points along DNA in cells derived from DMD patients, with the result of potentially correcting most of the 3,000 gene mutations that cause DMD.

DMD is a genetic disorder characterized by progressive muscle degeneration and weakness. It mostly affects boys and is caused by defects in the gene that makes dystrophin, a protein that helps strengthen muscle fibers in skeletal and cardiac muscles. Many patients end up in wheelchairs, on respirators, or both, and while advances in cardiac and respiratory care have increased life expectancy into the early 30s, there’s still no cure for the condition.

The study on CRISPR for DMD was the cover story of this month’s Science Advances, and it builds on previous studies led by Dr. Eric Olson, director of UT Southwestern’s Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine, in which CRISPR was used to correct a single gene mutation that caused DMD in mice.

The new study showed that various DMD-related mutations can be corrected in human cells by eliminating flawed splice sites in genomic DNA. These splice sites instruct genes to build abnormal dystrophin molecules. The protein then doesn’t function as it should to keep muscle cells intact, and muscles start to break down.

Researchers developed 12 guide RNAs to find mutation sites along the dystrophin gene. They cut the DNA at these locations and, in doing so, directed the cellular machinery to skip over the faulty protein sequences. Once the gene was successfully edited, it started building functional dystrophin protein, enhancing the function of muscle tissue.

“We found that correcting less than half of the cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) was enough to rescue cardiac function to near-normal levels in human-engineered heart tissue,” said Dr. Chengzu Long, lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine at New York University Langone Health.

This single-cut method is an efficient alternative to developing a separate molecular treatment for each one of the gene mutations that cause DMD, and could potentially be used to correct other single-gene mutations like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia.

“Not only did we find a practical way of treating many mutations, we have developed a less disruptive method that skips over defective DNA instead of removing it,” said Dr. Rhonda Bassel-Duby, co-author of the study and professor of molecular biology at UT Southwestern. “The genome is highly structured and you don’t want to remove DNA that could potentially be important.” She added that while single-cut editing may be useful for treating other single-gene diseases, the genes involved must still be able to function after certain DNA or RNA sequences are removed.

Before we sing CRISPR’s praises too loudly or start banking on it curing all our ailments, though, we must keep in mind that the tool is still very new, and we don’t really know what long-term results or late-onset side effects its use could engender. In fact, we’re not even sure it’ll always work in its current form on humans; one recent study found that some people may be “immune” to CRISPR, as an adaptive immune response can be triggered in people who have been exposed to the bacteria that’s used to engineer CRISPR proteins.

Clinical trials using CRISPR to cure blood disorders and sickle-cell disease in humans are slated to start this year in the US. Human trials have already begun in China, where CRISPR is being used to treat cancer and HIV. No peer-reviewed studies from these trials have been published yet, but doctors claim the tool has succeeded in improving some patients’ conditions.

Dr. Olson’s lab will continue testing its DMD method for side effects and will also look for ways to improve the precision of the guide RNAs. The team’s work led to the creation of biotech company Exonics Therapeutics, which has licensed the technology from UT Southwestern and is working to optimize the approach and extend it to other neuromuscular diseases.

“This is a major advance,” Dr. Bassel-Duby said. “Many different therapies have been put forward, but this one provides real hope to extend and improve the quality of patients’ lives.”

Evan Mawarire is a civil rights activist, pastor, and leader of the #ThisFlag movement in Zimbabwe.

Mawarire first gained considerable attention on social media following a video he posted in April 2016 that expressed his frustration with the state of the nation and Robert Mugabe’s government. In the video he encourages peaceful protest and urges people to refuse to pay bribes and stand up for their rights. In July 2016, the #ThisFlag campaign resulted in a mass movement of Zimbabweans shutting down the capital in a series of protests against corruption, poverty, and abuse of office by the Mugabe regime. Mawarire was charged with inciting public violence and “attempting to overthrow the government.” The court later threw out the charges and released him. Mawarire played a leading role in the peaceful protests which brought down Robert Mugabe in December 2017.

(Joseph) Scott Schiller is the Global Head of Customer and Market Development for HP Inc.’s 3D Printing business unit. His position has accountability for vertical market development, strategic customer engagement as well as strategic partnerships and alliances across HP’s 3D printing initiatives.

Since joining the 3D printing organization in 2014, Scott served as Business Director for the launch of Multi Jet Fusion™. Prior to that he spent eight years as part of the team that built a new business in HP focused on mass customization solutions for high volume print manufacturing. This business continues today as HP’s PageWide Press division.

Prior to joining HP, Scott had a variety of entrepreneurial and product development roles with companies such as Honeywell International Inc., Microsoft Corp. as well as leading several smaller businesses in Seattle.

Scott holds a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a master’s of business administration in Technology Marketing from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, Seattle.

As the Interim CEO of SqwidNet, Phathizwe Malinga will now also be responsible for building an IoT connectivity business in South Africa in partnership with International IoT giant Sigfox.

In addition to his new role, he will continue overlooking the development of the strategy and Connected Devices Solutions divisions for SqwidNet, a fully owned subsidiary of Dark Fibre Africa. The role of leading the SqwidNet comes naturally to Malinga as he has been in various leadership roles over the years.

He is no stranger to the role of a strategist, as he consulted with both Max Healthcare and Life Healthcare Group in his previous position with the organisation. He has been involved in the information technology and telecommunication industry for over two decades, having held senior management level positions.

Before joining SqwidNet, Malinga was the Head of Application Strategy at Life Healthcare Group, and he was in charge of the IT Application strategy and Software Development for the group. Phathizwe completed his Executive MBA from the Graduate School of Business, Cape Town and he is also a Guest Lecturer with the university as well.

Tanya Knowles is the Managing Executive of Fractal Solutions, a Division of Strate (Pty) Ltd. Fractal Solutions is tasks with the research and development of disruptive technologies, including blockchain / distributed ledger technology. Strate is South Africa’s authorised Central Securities Depository providing electronic settlement of securities concluded on various stock exchange in the country. Tanya is Chair of the South African Financial Markets Blockchain Consortium representing close to 50 of the country’s largest financial institutions. She is currently completing her certification in blockchain technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and holds a BA, PDM and MBA all from the University of the Witwatersrand. Having presented across four continents, Tanya is a well renowned speaker and thought leader in her area of expertise. In her private capacity, Tanya is involved in a number of women’s leadership and mentoring initiatives aimed at professional business women.

Known as the ‘Master of Influence’ by his clients, Gilan Gork is an internationally renowned Mentalist, Corporate Speaker, Trainer and Entertainer.

In 2016 Gilan founded the Influence Institute, where he and his team believe that everyone has ideas, products or services that deserve attention.

“We want to empower people with the ability to get the buy-in, agreement or support they need from others, so they can reach their highest success”, says Gilan.

Gilan has presented for Fortune500 companies in almost 30 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia and America, and is the author of the bestselling book “Persuasion Games”. With two decades’ experience as a professional mentalist, Gilan creates unique learning experiences that help you unleash your influence.

He teaches how to apply a working knowledge of influence and persuasion to real-life practical situations, to be able to lead, sell, negotiate, market and inspire on a new level.

As part of Gilan’s distinctive presentation style, he interactively demonstrates a remarkable ability to decode and influence people’s thoughts. He demonstrates how through psychology you can rapidly increase your levels of trust, credibility and influence with others.

Want to work with Gilan and the Influence Institute? Drop us a mail at manager@gilangork.com.

For more information about Gilan and how he uses his experience as a Mentalist to help others learn how to positively influence outcomes visit www.gilangork.com.

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As a mentalist, I am passionate about using influence to not only entertain, but educate my clients on how they can unlock their potential and achieve their objectives faster and more effectively. The techniques I use are as accessible to anyone as the ability to breathe, all you need to do is learn how to apply them.

Nnamdi is passionate about the power of technology and innovation to change the lives of Africans. He is the International Remittance Lead for Standard Bank Group and the author of two books on African innovation -Disrupting Africa: The Rise and Rise of African InnovationandTaking On Silicon Valley: How Africa’s Innovators will change its future, both books showing how African technology and digital payments can propel Africa as a technology powerhouse on the global stage.

His many travels and business experience across the continent have greatly contributed to his huge optimism for Africa and its bright future. He features frequently as a presenter and chairperson across various conferences in Africa, contributes regularly to media houses on the subject of innovation

He has been named amongst the”100 most influential names in Africa’s telecoms, media and ICT industry”by the AfricaCom100 Research Board and more recently, been named as one of the “Top 100 Most Influential People of African Descent”, a MIPAD initiative, as part of the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent.

Monique Giggy runs SU Ventures where she works closely with impact-focused startups that are solving world problems with technology. She and her team create programs and provide key resources that truly accelerate breakthroughs through curated networking, experience based coaching and a solid focus on metrics.

She is a seasoned value creator with proven success building/exiting companies, driving turnarounds, and leading high performing global teams. Prior to SU she conceived and helped build the world’s most popular and successful mobile golf application- Swing by Swing Golf which she sold in 2014. After the sell of her company she participated in the 2014 Global Solutions Program where she fell in love with SU.

Monique has served as an advisor and entrepreneurship coach, Venture Partner, CMO, and has started and invested in several companies.

John Sanei (Sah-nay) is an entrepreneur, innovation strategist, best-selling author and global speaker who talks about the future with a unique twist. By combining human psychology, future studies and business strategy, he guides audiences and leaders into an exponentially different future with excitement and optimism.

In What’s Your Moonshot? (his first book) he inspires the reader to ask bigger, bolder and more courageous questions about the future. In MAGNETiiZE – his second book, he invites the reader to focus on elegant, conscious and deliberate questions about the future.

John is also proudly the first African faculty member of the prestigious Singularity University in San Francisco and The Duke Corporation.

Mic believes that the future will be abundant as the power and potential of exponential technologies increase and their price gradually drop to zero, ultimately democratising numerous industries and improving the lives of all.

As co-founder of Mann Made – an award-winning experiential brand agency that has worked with top global and local Fortune 500 companies – Mic Mann has 19 years of experience in the media, marketing and eventing industry. Mic is a prolific speaker and strategist on exponential technologies, the future of work and the changing role of professionals.

After completing the Singularity University Executive Programme in 2015, he realised that in order to #futureproofAfrica we need to embrace exponential technologies. He subsequently brought the SingularityU South Africa Summit – the first of its kind on the continent – to South Africa. Mic’s passions are entrepreneurship and break-through technologies. He is also involved in the local start-up and maker community.

During the founding of the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, Danielle Strachman joined to lead the design and operations. She is the visionary behind the Thiel Summit series that has been attended by around 2 000 young entrepreneurs. Previous to her work with Peter Thiel, Danielle founded and directed Innovations Academy in San Diego, a K-8 charter school serving 350 students, with a focus on student-led, project-based learning and other alternative programmes.

Danielle is passionate about disrupting education and has worked with home schoolers, co-founded the Innovations Academy and 1517 Fund. The latter supports young entrepreneurs and technology start-ups with grant, pre-seed, and seed funding. 1517 Fund understands that not everyone is suited for higher education, hence it focuses on makers, hackers and scientists, who are interested in working outside tracked institutions. It motivates people to work on their passions, learn by doing and create new technologies.

Nastassia Arendse is the host of the Classic Business Breakfast on Classic FM, which is South Africa’s first morning business show that focuses on breaking business news, expert analysis and investment insight.

Nastassia has been working in broadcasting for eight years and has worked in television and radio. As a television anchor, she presented Closing Bell East Africa and Open Exchange on CNBC Africa.

As an experienced reporter, she covered global commodity markets for Mineweb, where she wrote articles that track changes and trends worldwide in the commodity space. The beat focused on how prospects for the global economy, interest rates and currencies influence investor decisions in relation to gold, precious metals, fixed income and equities.

In 2015, she hosted a show called Africa’s visionaries for SkyTV, which aired in the United Kingdom. She has interviewed a range of business leaders, including Barclays CEO Maria Ramos, Bidvest founder Brian Joffe, Comair CEO Erik Venter and former Mozambican President Joaquim Chissano among others.

Nastassia has a passion for technology and innovative. She represents a new breed of journalists that have managed to break the professional mould and explore different avenues in the media and public sphere.

As Deloitte Africa’s Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Valter Adão oversees Deloitte’s Digital and Innovation portfolios. He leads a diverse team of specialists, who create a leading digital ecosystem to assist organisations in understanding and undergoing Digital Transformation, whilst uplifting their digital experiences and becoming digital at the core, in order to remain viable and competitive in a world of ever-changing digital technologies.

Valter is a corporate entrepreneur with extensive experience in building new businesses across a variety of industries. He works mostly with blue-chip clients assisting them in re-imagining their businesses or identifying high value, innovative business opportunities and rapidly commercialising them into sustainable businesses.

Valter was previously the leader and founding director of Monitor Deloitte, following Deloitte’s acquisition of the Monitor group. He is also a member of Deloitte’s Global Innovation Executive Committee.

Alex Gladstein is Chief Strategy Officer at the Human Rights Foundation. He has also served as Vice President of Strategy for the Oslo Freedom Forum since its inception in 2009. In his work, Alex has connected hundreds of dissidents and civil society groups with business leaders, technologists, journalists, philanthropists, policymakers and artists to promote free and open societies. Alex’s writing and views on human rights and technology have appeared in media outlets across the world, including: The Atlantic, BBC, CNN, Fast Company, The Guardian, Monocle, NowThis, NPR, Quartz, TIME, WIRED, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken at universities ranging from MIT to Stanford, presented at the European Parliament and participated in Singularity University events from Berlin to Johannesburg. He has also spoken at a range of blockchain events about why bitcoin matters for freedom.

Adam Pantanowitz is a fanatical technologist, who was inspired to learn by growing up in the age of the world wide web. Since studying biomedical and electrical engineering, he has worked in the field of biotech and software. Adam is a Fellow of The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and is chartered internationally as an engineer. He is part of the first group of faculty for Singularity University South Africa, with a focus on biotechnology.

Adam has lectured Engineering and Medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand since 2009. In academia, Adam’s innovations have resulted in a number of patents, academic papers and the creation of the media interest piece “Brainternet”, with its world-first, portable brain-internet livestream. Some of his other projects, on which he has worked alongside colleagues, include an eye-controlled wheelchair, a non-cognitive brain transmission channel that uses light and a thought-controlled robotic arm with a light-to-brain on/off switch. Their other innovations include a hands-free controlled surgery interaction system, a CPR monitoring system, a computer-based sign language interpreter and an innovative eye-controlled cursor.

He enjoys solving seemingly unsolvable problems and co-founded businesses AURA, Tariffic, Lawbuntu, among others. He also acted as CTO of VATIT, the world’s largest VAT reclaim business from 2015 until 2017.

Adam speaks around the world on the future of technology with a focus on tech-human convergence and also does motivational speaking.

Dr Taddy Blecher is CEO of the Maharishi Institute and the Imvula Empowerment Trust, CEO of the Community and Individual Development Association and former Chairperson of the South African National Government task team on entrepreneurship, education and job creation. He is a pioneer of the free tertiary education movement in South Africa and has helped establish six free-access institutions of higher learning.

Taddy co-founded the Branson School of Entrepreneurship with Sir Richard Branson and has raised over R500 million in cash, property and equity to support free access to post-secondary school education. As a result, over 17 000 unemployed South Africans have been educated, found employment and transitioned from living in poverty to the middle class. These formerly unemployed youth now have combined salaries in excess of R1 billion per annum and expected lifetime earnings of R27.2 billion. Over 600 000 young school-going South Africans have been reached with his one-week education and life-skills training courses.

Taddy was chosen as one of 21 Icons in South Africa, is a 2002 World Economic Forum “Global Leader of Tomorrow”​ award recipient, a 2005 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader of the World”, a Skoll Global Social Entrepreneur, who has won a $1 million prize for his work and has been honoured with two honorary doctorates. In 2009, author Tom Peters named Taddy one of his top five most influential entrepreneurs in the world over the last 30 years. Over 50 published books have profiled his work, including three recent books by Sir Richard Branson.

As a qualified actuary and management consultant, Taddy is passionate about the approach of Consciousness-Based Education, a system of education that develops the full potential of each student. This has led the Maharishi Institute to win the first prize in a global competition to find the most promising and innovative education initiative in the world.

Richard Browning is the Founder of the pioneering aeronautical innovation company called Gravity. Since its launch in March 2017, Gravity has invented, built and patented an Iron Man like flight system.

The dream was to reimagine an entirely new form of authentic human flight that leans on an elegant collaboration of the mind and body that is augmented by cutting-edge technology. Gravity has to date been experienced by over a billion people globally with video views running at more than 60 million within the first week of launch. In the first year Gravity executed 46 flight events across 16 countries including at four TED talks.

Richard and his team are delivering on the vision to build Gravity into a world-class aeronautical engineering business, that can challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if?’.

As Director of International Summits, Bohdanna Kesala’s work is to bring influencers together to cross-pollinate regional, national and global ideas that will grow into tech and social change for the betterment of all.

After graduating from Indiana University-Bloomington, Bohdanna worked at Northwestern University as their Special Events Coordinator. There she met and worked with politicians, Supreme Court justices and the brightest academic minds, while witnessing the power of knowledge and change.

From there, she moved to San Francisco and received a Post Baccalaureate Certificate in Painting from California College of Arts and an MFA in Painting from San Francisco State University. For the next decade Bohdanna concentrated on her art career. She exhibited her work in the United States and Europe, while also teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute. Bohdanna’s paintings focused on beauty and history and how they can bring people together visually.

Merging her creativity and passion to bring people together in collaboration, Bohdanna began working for The Thiel Foundation as their Event Curator, managing all aspects of their events from high-level design to curating speakers and building partnerships between other organisations. Some highlights include: managing all events for CNBC Transforming Tomorrow: a documentary focused on the Thiel Fellowship, working with Wired.com to produce events for ‘Teen Technorati’, a web series on The Thiel Fellowship, and producing events for Breakout Labs Unboxing: a showcase of BOL’s grantees. Bohdanna was also one of the architects of The Thiel Foundation Summit, a bi-annual assembly of young entrepreneurs and visionaries from around the world.

Working directly with entrepreneurs inspired Bohdanna to open 10 Forward Events, a full-service, event-curation firm specialising in producing innovative and one-of-a-kind events for the science and tech industry, start-ups, entrepreneurs and VC firms. This endeavour ultimately brought her to Singularity University.

Rob Nail is the CEO and Associate founder of Singularity University. He brings a unique entrepreneurial and globally-focused approach to growing a non-traditional university as a platform to create a future of abundance, where exponential technologies empower us to solve global grand challenges.

Prior to Singularity University, he co-founded Velocity11 in 1999, which built automation equipment and robotics for cancer research and pharmaceutical development. After being acquired by Agilent Technologies in 2007, he traded the role of CEO to become General Manager in an attempt to be a catalyst for change at a big company. He gave that up in 2009 to go surfing and eventually find his true calling and biggest challenge yet with Singularity University. He is a director at Harman (HAR) and Light&Motion, as well as a co-founder and Director of Alite Designs. Rob is an active angel investor and advisor. He holds degrees in Mechanical, Materials Science and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of California, Davis and Stanford University.

Jeffrey Rogers is a facilitator, speaker and programme designer, who creates interactive educational experiences driven by storytelling, engagement and play. He’s an academically trained social scientist (University of California, Berkeley and the University of Texas-Austin) with a knack for future-thinking and a deep belief in the transformative potential of exponential technologies as tools to de-risk experimentation, accelerate learning and create change.

Jeffrey speaks frequently across the world on exponential thinking and leads workshops on creative problem-solving and storytelling. He’s connected dots, ideas and people as a moderator recently for the Singularity University Executive Programme and Exponential Tech and Strategy programmes for Oracle, Google, Roche, NBC, Aegon among other global brands.

Prior to joining Singularity University, Jeffrey spent a decade building learning and development solutions across sectors and designing and delivering award-winning educational and training programmes. He currently serves as Singularity University’s Director of Faculty and Facilitator Development. Jeffrey works closely with the faculty to help individuals discover their unique strengths as communicators and teachers, and to co-create rave-worthy, learner-centred experiences online and at Singularity University.

As co-founder and CEO of Mann Made – an award-winning, experiential brand agency for top local and global Fortune 500 companies – Shayne Mann has 17 years’ of experience in the media, marketing and eventing industries. Over the decades he has successfully driven Mann Made to become a 65-employee strong company that specialises in activations, events, media products and productions, as well as mobile and telecoms.

Shayne is a SingularityU alumnus and was also the co-CEO of SingularityU South Africa. He epitomises exponential leadership and is passionate about how exponential and disruptive technologies can drive change to positively impact South Africa and the continent.

Shayne is passionate about the drivers of entrepreneurship and is involved in the local start-up and maker communities. He has partnered with the Maharishi University of Management, Taddy Blecher and The Ubuntu Foundation. In partnership with an international private equity investor, he has invested in a variety of industries including property, medicine, music, media, and tech, alongside his brother Mic. His personal passions include cycling, meditation and leading a healthy lifestyle and creating a positive impact in the country through all he does.

Nathana O’Brien Sharma is the Program Director for Faculty Affairs at Singularity University. She’s also faculty in Law, Policy, Ethics and Blockchain, where she writes and speaks on the impact of accelerating technologies and the future of law and governance to audiences of technologists and business leaders. Nathana is a principal at Crypto-Lotus, a cryptocurrency hedge fund and is an Advisory Board Member for the Creative Destruction Labs in Toronto, the leading academic startup accelerator in North America which supports companies in specialized technology tracks including machine learning and quantum machine learning.

Nathana is an International Association of Privacy Professionals certified privacy expert in both the US and the EU and advises companies on navigating complex cross-border privacy issues, particularly in connection with the use of emerging technologies. Nathana was previously a technology transactions associate at Gunderson Dettmer, where she advised high growth VC backed startups and venture funds on a range of technology and business issues. Nathana is a JD/MBA graduate of the Yale Law School and Yale School of Management.

Nathana was a lead researcher at MetaMed, a VC backed medical research start up and has a background in the lab in immunology and neuroscience. She is also a graduate of Singularity University’s Graduate Studies Program.

Anita is the CEO and Co-Founder of Iris.ai; one of the 10 most innovative artificial intelligence startups in 2017 according to Fast Company. Iris.ai is an AI Science assistant, able to read, digest and connect scientific knowledge, that will grow up to be the world’s first AI Researcher within a decade.

Set out to democratize access to science, Iris.ai can reduce R&D departments’ time to map out existing research by 95% and remove current requirements of having deep domain expertise involved in the process, thus allowing more people to solve more difficult problems.

Anita is a highly sought after public speaker, one of Inspiring Fifty Nordic’s most inspiring women in tech, twice TEDx speaker and 500 startups, SU Global Grand Challenges Awards and TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield alumni. Anita is also the first Norwegian to attend Singularity University’s Global Solution Program in 2015 – and she put on the first Global Impact Challenge Norway in 2016.

Anita has never had what she refers to as “a real job” and Iris.ai is her fourth own startup. The past 10 years of her career have spanned over 9 industries including developing an e-learning tool in Silicon Valley, performing theatre for babies, reducing energy consumption in the process industry through heat exchanger network optimization, getting 30 (mainly middle-age, male) engineers to dance to ABBA in front of their co-workers, facilitating solar light business creation in Kenya, being in the centre of several startups crashing and burning, organizing entrepreneurial conferences and trying to disrupt the recruitment industry. She also dropped by 6 universities on the way. And built a race car.

Dr Geci Karuri-Sebina has been Executive Manager at South African Cities Network since 2011. She previously worked with National Treasury, the CSIR, HSRC, and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Advanced Policy Institute. Dr. Geci holds Masters degrees in Urban Planning and Architecture from UCLA, and a PhD from the University of Witwatersrand.

Her interests span a range of development foresight, policy, planning and practice topics, particularly relating to urban governance, the built environment and innovation systems. She has two decades’ experience working and publishing in these fields. She recently published the book Innovation Africa (Emerald Books, 2016).

Dr. Geci is a Council Member on the South African Council of Planners, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand School of Governance, and an Research Associate of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation (IERI) and the National Research Foundation’s South African Research Chairon Innovation and Development.

She is also a founding director of the Southern African Node of the Millennium Project, co-founder of ForesightForDevelopment.org, an Associate Editor for the African Journal for Science, Technology, Innovation and Development (Taylor & Francis), and Africa Regional Editor forForesight: The journal of future studies, strategic thinking and policy (Emerald).

Fred Swaniker is deeply passionate about Africa and believes that the key missing ingredient on the continent is good leadership. This belief led him to launch the African Leadership Group, which aims to groom 3 million leaders for Africa by 2035. Prior to launching his entrepreneurial pursuits, Swaniker worked at McKinsey & Company in South Africa.

Swaniker has been recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and was listed by Forbes Magazine among the top ten young ‘power men’ in Africa. Fred has an MBA from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he was named an Arjay Miller Scholar, a distinction awarded to the top 10% of each graduating class. He holds a BA in Economics with a minor in Mathematical Statistics from Macalester College (magna cum laude). He was born in Ghana but has lived and worked in about 10 different African countries.

Jamie Wheal is an expert on peak performance and leadership, specializing in the neuroscience and application of Flow states. He has advised everyone from the U.S. Naval War College and Special Operations Command, the athletes of RedBull, and the owners of NFL, NBA, MLB and Premier League teams, to the executives of Google, Deloitte Cisco and Young Presidents’ Organization. He studied historical anthropology under MacArthur Fellow Patricia Nelson Limerick, specializing in utopian social movements and his work has appeared in anthologies and peer-reviewed academic journals.

Wheal co-authored Stealing Fire; a provocative examination of what’s actually possible; a guidebook for anyone who wants to radically upgrade their life.

Jamie Wheal is Partner at Fulcrum Advisors and Executive Directive of Flow Genome Project, an international trans-disciplinary organization dedicated to reverse-engineering the genome of Flow, or the peak performance state, by 2020.

Ramez Naam is a computer scientist, futurist, and award-winning author. Ramez spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams developing early versions of Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer, and the Bing search engine. His career has focused on bringing advanced collaboration, communication, and information retrieval capabilities to roughly one billion people around the world, and took him to the role of Partner and Director of Program Management within Microsoft, with deep experience leading teams working on cutting edge technologies such as machine learning, search, massive scale services, and artificial intelligence.

Between stints at Microsoft, Ramez founded and ran Apex NanoTechnologies, the world first company devoted entirely to software tools to accelerate molecular design. He holds 19 patents related to search engines, information retrieval, web browsing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.

Ramez is also the H.G. Wells Award-winning author of four books: The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (non-fiction), which looks at the environmental and natural resource challenges of climate change, energy, water, and food, and charts a course to meet those challenges by investing in the scientific and technological innovation needed to overcome them, and by changing our policies to encourage both conservation and critical innovations.

He’s a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy at Aurora Illinois. In his leisure, Ramez has climbed mountains, descended into icy crevasses, chased sharks through their native domain, backpacked through remote corners of China, and ridden his bicycle down hundreds of miles of the Vietnam coast. He lives in Seattle, where he writes and speaks full time.

Nathaniel Calhoun helps guide Singularity University’s approach to changemaking and impact as a founding member and Vice Chair of its Global Grand Challenge Faculty. He has moderated numerous SU Executive Programs and Directed SU’s flagship impact program, the Global Solutions Program (GSP).

Nathaniel closely tracks innovations in emerging decentralized and platform cooperative technologies that create brand new business models and opportunities. He tracks disruptive and precedent setting changes within policy, especially related to governance and civic technologies. He specializes in helping both private and public sector actors to understand how to leverage and prepare for the growth of these and related trends, offering a unique take on the options facing an aspiring “exponential organization.”

Nathaniel also supervises the creation and implementation of digital technologies at a global scale that help alleviate poverty while increasing business literacy along with digital and financial services in Sub-Saharan Africa and South East Asia. He does this work through CODE Innovation, a consulting company he founded in 2009 to help organizations like UNICEF and Plan International to use web and mobile technologies more effectively. Code Innovation has received financial support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to further develop their Self Help Group digital platform, which is growing exponentially in nine languages and more than a dozen countries.

Nathaniel has two decades of experience in the field of education, public speaking, moderation and resilience building. He tracks the threat of technological unemployment and the relative merits of the solutions that humanity is offering around this issue. After living and working in Africa for more than a decade, Nathaniel enjoys helping organizations to think through their strategies with new and emerging markets.

Nathaniel is available for a variety of customized speaking and consulting packages. A sampling of keynote presentations is described below. Talks below can be given in 30, 45, 60, 75 and 90 minute varieties. Prices vary depending on industry, location, duration and special requests.

Professor Mark Post first got involved in a Dutch government-funded programme investigating “in vitro meat” in 2008, when he was a professor of tissue engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The programme had been initiated by Wilem van Eelen, an 86-year-old entrepreneur who held a long-time fascination for the possibility of culturing meat.When the director of the programme fell ill, about mid-way through the programme, Post took over supervision of the PhD students. Motivated by the potentially high societal impact, he continued research even after the funding had ended in 2010.

Renewed funding by a private partner enabled the realisation of a project to create a processed meat product using muscle cells from a cow.Professor Post received his medical degree from the University of Utrecht in 1982 and trained for a PhD in Pulmonary Pharmacology, graduating from the University of Utrecht in 1989.He joined the KNAW Interuniversity Cardiology Institute of the Netherlands before being appointed full-time Assistant Professor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA in 1996. Five years later, he moved with his lab to Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH, and was appointed Associate Professor of Medicine and of Physiology.

In July 2002, Dr. Post returned to the Netherlands as a Professor of Vascular Physiology at Maastricht University and Professor of Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering at the Technical University Eindhoven. Since January 2004 he has been Chair of Physiology at Maastricht University.

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Jody is the Director of Design for SU Labs, where she provides design and innovation direction for corporate, startup and field impact teams. She employs a radical approach to Human Centered Design to create exponential solutions to the world’s toughest problems. She also speaks about Augmented and Virtual Reality for SU.

In her 23-year design career, Jody has created just about everything from holograms to physical products and R&D. Today, she is Director of Design for Singularity University Labs, where she incubates solutions to Global Grand Challenges using exponential technologies. She specializes in the avant garde of technology, covering everything from Artificial Intelligence to Robotics. She’s spent the last 9 years on AR/VR, most notably as Principal Experience Designer on the HoloLens Project at Microsoft and Principal UX at LEAP Motion. She has traveled the world, speaking about the future of these technologies and their impact on the world for groups like WIRED, Google, and TEDx. Previously, she co-founded and directed Kicker Studio, a design consultancy specializing in Natural User Interface, Perceptual Computing, and R&D for companies including Intel, Samsung, Microsoft, and DARPA.

Jody is also a practicing artist with an MFA in Painting and Design & Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute. She’s a collaborator with the art crew Five Ton Crane, and in her spare time, makes her own clothes while building robots and rockets.

Jason co-founded Made In Space in 2010 as a result of analyzing the best possible approaches to enabling a fully sustainable form of space colonization.

With a core focus on space manufacturing, the company has since built, flown, and operated the first and second 3D printers in space. Installed on the International Space Station (ISS), the first Made In Space Zero Gravity 3D printer began space manufacturing in November 2014. Today, Made In Space operates the second generation 3D printer on the ISS, called the Additive Manufacturing Facility, enabling groups across the planet to have hardware manufactured in space.

Additionally, Made In Space is working with NASA in the development of the Archinaut program to enable in space robotic manufacturing and assembly of large space structures. In 2016, Made In Space announced the first space mission to manufacture goods in space for use on Earth; an exotic optical fiber expected to have 100 times lower attenuation than traditional silica fiber when produced in the weightlessness of space.

Jason holds a B.S. and M.S. in aerospace engineering from the University of Central Florida, has studied at the Singularity University Graduate Summer Program, and is an internationally recognized speaker on the topics of space exploration, advanced manufacturing, and the theory of disruption.

He serves on the University of Central Florida College of Engineering and Computer Science Dean’s Advisory Board, the Advisory Council to the Waypaver Foundation, the Technical Advisory Board for Space For Humanity, and on the Board of Directors for the Future Space Leaders Foundation. In 2014, Forbes recognized Jason on the prestigious 30 under 30 list.

Stacey Ferreira is an Arizona native who co-founded her first company, a single sign on company called MySocialCloud, when she graduated from high school. She attracted investors like Sir Richard Branson, Jerry Murdock and Alex Welch through Twitter who invested $1.2M in the business when she was just 18 years old.

In 2013, Stacey sold MySocialCloud.com to Reputation.com and went on to publish her first best-selling book called 2 Billion Under 20: How Millennials Are Breaking Down Age Barriers & Changing the World.

Stacey is currently the CEO of Forge, an enterprise workforce management software that empowers hourly employees to work on-demand while providing retailers the tools needed to source, hire, manage and retain their workforces.

In addition to her entrepreneurial work, Ferreira was selected as one of twenty Thiel Fellows selected for the 2015 Thiel Fellowship and is a US State Department Speaker who has given speeches about entrepreneurship in Russia, Egypt, Cameroon and the Central African Republic to name a few.

John Hagel III has nearly 35 years of experience as a management consultant, author, speaker and entrepreneur, and has helped companies improve their performance by effectively applying new generations of technology to reshape business strategies. John currently serves as co-chairman of the Silicon Valley-based Deloitte Center for the Edge, which conducts original research into emerging business opportunities that should be on the CEO agenda. In recent years, the Center for the Edge has established branches in Melbourne, Australia and in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Before joining Deloitte, John was an independent consultant and author. Prior to that, he held significant positions at leading consulting firms and companies. From 1984 to 2000, he was a principal at McKinsey & Co., where he was a leader of the Strategy Practice. In addition, he founded and led McKinsey Electronic Commerce Practice from 1993 to 2000. John has also served as senior vice president of strategic planning at Atari, Inc., and earlier in his career, worked at Boston Consulting Group.

He is the founder of two Silicon Valley startups. John is the author of a series of best-selling business books, including his most recent book, The Power of Pull and, earlier, The Only Sustainable Edge, Out of the Box, Net Worth and Net Gain. He has won two awards from Harvard Business Review for best articles in that publication and has been recognized as an industry thought leader by a variety of publications and professional service firms.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging.

He received his BA and Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000 respectively.

His original field was computer science, and he did research in the private sector for six years in the area of software verification before switching to biogerontology in the mid-1990s. His research interests encompass the characterization of all the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism that constitute mammalian aging and the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage.

He has developed a possibly comprehensive plan for such repair, termed Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which breaks aging down into seven major classes of damage and identifies detailed approaches to addressing each one. A key aspect of SENS is that it can potentially extend healthy lifespan without limit, even though these repair processes will probably never be perfect, as the repair only needs to approach perfection rapidly enough to keep the overall level of damage below pathogenic levels. Dr. de Grey has termed this required rate of improvement of repair therapies longevity escape velocity.

Dr. de Grey is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations.

Tiffany Vora is an educator, writer, research scientist, and entrepreneur who is excited to bring her diversity of experience to Singularity University as Principal Faculty in Medicine and Digital Biology.

After earning undergraduate degrees in Biology and Chemistry at New York University, Tiffany worked on cutting-edge drug-discovery technologies at Bristol-Myers Squibb. Her PhD research in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, which was funded through NASA, brought her into the emerging fields of genomics, systems biology, and computational biology. It was during this time that Tiffany developed an interest in the cultural shifts that accompany new technologies and new ways of thinking. She translated this interest into a global perspective by joining the American University of Cairo as a Visiting Assistant Professor, where she spearheaded curriculum development for core classes in scientific thinking as well as computational biology classes for non-programmers.

Upon her return to the United States, Tiffany founded Bayana Science, an editing, writing, and consulting company dedicated to excellence in science communication. Tiffany also served as an instructor for the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University. She has contributed to literally thousands of grant proposals, research articles, presentations, textbooks, and other works spanning medicine, computer science, applied physics, chemistry, nanotechnology, and the life sciences; her biology expertise encompasses fields as diverse as the microbiome, ancient molecules, biophysics, environmental monitoring, tissue engineering, biohacking, and the quantitative analysis of large biological datasets.

Tiffany loves encountering the natural world through hiking and scuba diving. She travels extensively with her family, seeking out new experiences and cultures. She enjoys sharing her passions through teaching, writing, and public speaking.

David Roberts is regarded as one of the world top experts on disruptive innovation and exponentially advancing technology. His passion is to help transform the lives of a billion suffering people in the world through disruptive innovation.

David served as Vice President of Singularity University and two-time Director (and alum) of the Graduate Studies Program. He is an award winning CEO and serial entrepreneur, and has started ventures backed with over $100 million of investment from Kleiner Perkins, Vinod Khosla, Cisco, Oracle, Accenture, In-Q-Tel, and others.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and medals and has led the development of some of the most complex, state-of-the art systems ever built, to include satellites, drones, and fusion centers. He also worked as an Investment Banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group at Goldman Sachs Headquarters. He received his B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from M.I.T. was a Distinguished Graduate, and majored in Artificial Intelligence and Bio-Computer Engineering. He holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

David is Chairman at HaloDrop, a revolutionary global drone services company, Chairman at 1QBit the world first software company for quantum computers, and is a formal adviser to Made-In Space, responsible for manufacturing the first object in Space with a 3D printer on the Space Station.

Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley Business schools have all written and taught case studies on David leadership, management, and decision making. He has been featured on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, and in USA Today, Fortune Magazine, The New York Times, Business Week, CNN, and dozens of others. His startups have received many awards to include Internet World Net Rising Stars,Red Herring Catch, top 50 Private Companies in the World, Red Herring Top100 Private Companies in the World, USA Today Tech Reviews Best Picks, Internet Outlook Investors Choice Award, Enterprise Outlook Investors Choice, Best of the Web from PC World, and Apple Computer Premier Systems Integrator Award.

His fascination with technology began In fourth grade after building a hovering electric drone, to carry his younger sister to the bus stop, powered by what was formerly his mother’s vacuum cleaner, and fortunately limited by the length of an electric power cord.